Become a Fellow

JSK Fellows review notes of interviews with news consumers.

A JSK Fellowship is a life-changing experience. Each year, we select up to 20 fellows from around the world and bring them together for 10 months at Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Immersed in the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of this region, they are inspired to let go of old assumptions and learn new ways of thinking and working.

We select fellows who identify and articulate a specific journalism challenge they want to explore in hopes of identifying potential solutions they will continue to work on beyond their time with us. We expect them to arrive in the program with more questions than answers and we seek people who are eager to experiment and to change course based on what they learn along the way.

If you are looking for a sabbatical, this is not the program for you. JSK Fellows spend a significant portion of their time pursuing their journalism challenges, while also taking advantage of classes and other activities at Stanford and in Silicon Valley. By the end of the program, we expect fellows to have some sort of outcome from their work on the journalism challenges. That outcome can take many forms and is often a preliminary or intermediate step toward a goal that the fellow will continue to pursue after their JSK fellowship. Some fellows explore ideas that involve technology, others work on challenges that focus on organizational change and innovation. We are not a program focused on creating products, companies or organizations, though some fellows have ended up doing those things. We also are not a reporting fellowship.

You need to meet a few eligibility requirements and applications are accepted online. There is no single formula for identifying a journalism challenge that will assure you are selected for a JSK Fellowship. The best advice we can give you is this: Identify a challenge that you are passionate about pursuing and that is important to helping journalism.

The John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford foster journalistic innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. Each year, we give twenty outstanding individuals from around the world the resources to pursue and test their ideas for improving the quality of news and information reaching the public.